Coming at the end rather than at the beginning, 'What Happens Next' reads NOT as a programmatic statement but as an experiment: what would happen to the art history of past political events if we use a model of encounter? What would those histories become? How would they treat the past?
It's also a methodological chapter: after tracking the encounter through three primary cases, the coda would ask, and try to answer, some questions about what art history would have to look like, what it would have to become, in order deal with an aesthetics of encounter? What would its politics become? What would count as political art history? How, in that POV, does October school politics (e.g. Buchloh) look wrong? Limiting? Darboven, Kawara, Buchloh and Lippard all then become cases in that story.
The overall gesture is not "this is how not to do it" but "this is how to do it, this is how it might be done."
Thursday, May 22, 2008
That Which Wants to be Found
If the CI is in the business of producing blandly homogenizing products with the appeal of uniqueness, they are also in the business of making products that are there to be found, sometimes with an appeal of being hard to find.
The feeling of uniqueness and the feeling of rarity would both be CI tactics, marketing tactics. Each evidence, in the POV of CI critique, for the truth that lies beneath them: all products are the same, all products want to be found.
If all products want to be found, then searching for them is a sham, a put-on, a feeling the product cultivates in people to make the product more attractive. That's all. In this sense, searching takes the form that J. Dean says it takes in Publicity's Secret (where searching for information produces the feeling that democracy is at work, is working, that a critical public sphere exists).
Example: the atrophied, vestigial adjective "indie" in the music industry signals lots of things, but one of the most important is that this band is still hard to find, still rare, i.e. finding them accrues cultural capital to the finder. Searching for art, being the one to find it, is still a valued activity with middle-brow cachet. Curation in one of it's worst modes would be this taken to an extreme, made into an art: a curator would be one who has the best taste in art, where that taste is the product of diligent, thorough, expensive, eagle-eyed searching. Knowing where to look, how to cull, how to sift. Having good taste bespeaks a skill for surfing networks, for getting around, for finding new sites. One has one's set of reliable places to look, but before that, more mysterious, and harder, is the skill of finding new places to look. Searching for new places to search.
Galloway's thesis about networks and protocols applies here. In my reading (as a start anyway), a protocol would be a set of rules for constraining the kinds of searching one can do through that network.
But I don't love the part of the CI critique which has to produce an illusion in order to produce a Real underneath (that only the critic can access, or see, or live). In part, because it makes knowledge too exclusive. But it also puts too much faith in knowledge (how would it help someone to know that their pleasure in searching for new music, their pleasure in finding something new, being the first, is just itself a desired and planned and homogeneous marketing ploy? Would they be less pleased? Would they revolt?). The feeling of pleasure in the search is something in itself; not just illusion, deception, CI administration of life.
So there is pleasure in searching. And there is also cachet, cultural capital. In searching itself (knowing how to make google give you the results you want), and in searching for particular things (new wines, new music). The cachet in searching for particular things comes from being able to make sense, or produce a system, from an overwhelmingly large market. The market for music and for wine, for instance, are bigger than any one person could get around. This is true of the Internet itself. Cultural capital comes from being able to make sense of it, to produce value and meaning out of it (good bands, good wines; stuff no one else knows about) despite its grandiosity, its near infiniteness.
Is all this to imply that finding value in skillful searching is a middle brow activity, in that it always points to having good taste (in bands, in wines, in search engines)? Are there low brow equivalents, equivalents among the poor? I'm asking how classed an activity is searching? And the value ascribed to skillful searching?
The feeling of uniqueness and the feeling of rarity would both be CI tactics, marketing tactics. Each evidence, in the POV of CI critique, for the truth that lies beneath them: all products are the same, all products want to be found.
If all products want to be found, then searching for them is a sham, a put-on, a feeling the product cultivates in people to make the product more attractive. That's all. In this sense, searching takes the form that J. Dean says it takes in Publicity's Secret (where searching for information produces the feeling that democracy is at work, is working, that a critical public sphere exists).
Example: the atrophied, vestigial adjective "indie" in the music industry signals lots of things, but one of the most important is that this band is still hard to find, still rare, i.e. finding them accrues cultural capital to the finder. Searching for art, being the one to find it, is still a valued activity with middle-brow cachet. Curation in one of it's worst modes would be this taken to an extreme, made into an art: a curator would be one who has the best taste in art, where that taste is the product of diligent, thorough, expensive, eagle-eyed searching. Knowing where to look, how to cull, how to sift. Having good taste bespeaks a skill for surfing networks, for getting around, for finding new sites. One has one's set of reliable places to look, but before that, more mysterious, and harder, is the skill of finding new places to look. Searching for new places to search.
Galloway's thesis about networks and protocols applies here. In my reading (as a start anyway), a protocol would be a set of rules for constraining the kinds of searching one can do through that network.
But I don't love the part of the CI critique which has to produce an illusion in order to produce a Real underneath (that only the critic can access, or see, or live). In part, because it makes knowledge too exclusive. But it also puts too much faith in knowledge (how would it help someone to know that their pleasure in searching for new music, their pleasure in finding something new, being the first, is just itself a desired and planned and homogeneous marketing ploy? Would they be less pleased? Would they revolt?). The feeling of pleasure in the search is something in itself; not just illusion, deception, CI administration of life.
So there is pleasure in searching. And there is also cachet, cultural capital. In searching itself (knowing how to make google give you the results you want), and in searching for particular things (new wines, new music). The cachet in searching for particular things comes from being able to make sense, or produce a system, from an overwhelmingly large market. The market for music and for wine, for instance, are bigger than any one person could get around. This is true of the Internet itself. Cultural capital comes from being able to make sense of it, to produce value and meaning out of it (good bands, good wines; stuff no one else knows about) despite its grandiosity, its near infiniteness.
Is all this to imply that finding value in skillful searching is a middle brow activity, in that it always points to having good taste (in bands, in wines, in search engines)? Are there low brow equivalents, equivalents among the poor? I'm asking how classed an activity is searching? And the value ascribed to skillful searching?
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Databases as Representations (Searching, Hits, Encounters)
(http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/21/google_henziger/print.html)
In order to build a database for a search engine, the search engine company must build an “internal representation” of the web, the web’s link structure, and build into that representation the potential for rank, hierarchy vis. individual searches.
This “representation” is based on the company’s “understanding” of what documents are about, i.e. their algorithms are that understanding and a representation of that understanding. They are the part of the search engine that encodes an understanding of how to understand web pages in terms of their potential relevance to an potentially infinite set of potential searches. Talk about potentiality and immanence!
Where potentiality meets hard materiality is when a person conducts a search. Then, the results of that search can only bring back what is immanent in the representation. It cannot bring back what the database does not contain, a document (webpage) that has not been indexed, a word that does not appear in the database, a combination of words that has not been cross-referenced or is not cross-referenceable in the database. The database is potentiality ONLY when the database is being built, when the web crawlers are doing their work. It ceases to be potentiality when queries are conducted: at that exact point in time, the possibilities are not endless. They are vast, but not endless. Not that anyone would notice, but it’s an important distinction (cf. the fact from a post ago that when one searches Google, one only searches about half the searchable content of the web).
A database is a representation.
The other half of the search that a search engine must “understand” is the search query itself. Here potentiality comes back in in the form of unreadability, unpredictability, illegibility of the search. If the search engine cannot figure out what the search is about, then it returns more random hits. So the query is itself a representation, in the eyes of the search engine, and some are more legible than others. Legible or their real wish or desire. “Car” is an ambiguous wish. “Car sex” is a less ambiguous wish. This is true both for human readers and search engines.
So an interesting feature of Beacon is that it puts viewers in the same position that the search engines themselves are in: both are readers of the queries, both are in a position of having to interpret what the query means, what it points to, what it indexes, what it wants. Perhaps the search engine’s reading is a more constrained, instrumental one; perhaps it wants only to know more precisely what the searcher wants to know, get, learn. Whereas Beacon’s viewers, forced into the position of search engine-as-reader, get to have a more wide-reaching curiosity, get to have pathologizing thoughts, more sociological thoughts, make the searcher into a general person rather than a singular person. But the search engine uses rules to interpret the query, which is its own form of generalization: making an individual into a general person on the basis of their wants and wishes, insofar as those wants and wishes are able to be articulated with the wants and wishes of other searchers, insofar as the wants and wishes are generalizable. Where the general probably means repeated; where something like that wish has been seen before, so that it can 1. Be predicted by the database and the crawlers and 2. Be predicted by the program that matches queries to the database, one representation to another.
When a person’s query encounters the search engine database, one representation (of the web as indexed by, say, google) encounters another (a person’s capacity to render their wish in words). A representation of the web meets a representation of a single person’s wish. The results of the encounter are called “hits.” Why hits? Literally, a hit is where a person’s wish hits, impacts, lands in the database. The search engine then returns these hits as results, but they are literally the trace of an impact.
In order to build a database for a search engine, the search engine company must build an “internal representation” of the web, the web’s link structure, and build into that representation the potential for rank, hierarchy vis. individual searches.
This “representation” is based on the company’s “understanding” of what documents are about, i.e. their algorithms are that understanding and a representation of that understanding. They are the part of the search engine that encodes an understanding of how to understand web pages in terms of their potential relevance to an potentially infinite set of potential searches. Talk about potentiality and immanence!
Where potentiality meets hard materiality is when a person conducts a search. Then, the results of that search can only bring back what is immanent in the representation. It cannot bring back what the database does not contain, a document (webpage) that has not been indexed, a word that does not appear in the database, a combination of words that has not been cross-referenced or is not cross-referenceable in the database. The database is potentiality ONLY when the database is being built, when the web crawlers are doing their work. It ceases to be potentiality when queries are conducted: at that exact point in time, the possibilities are not endless. They are vast, but not endless. Not that anyone would notice, but it’s an important distinction (cf. the fact from a post ago that when one searches Google, one only searches about half the searchable content of the web).
A database is a representation.
The other half of the search that a search engine must “understand” is the search query itself. Here potentiality comes back in in the form of unreadability, unpredictability, illegibility of the search. If the search engine cannot figure out what the search is about, then it returns more random hits. So the query is itself a representation, in the eyes of the search engine, and some are more legible than others. Legible or their real wish or desire. “Car” is an ambiguous wish. “Car sex” is a less ambiguous wish. This is true both for human readers and search engines.
So an interesting feature of Beacon is that it puts viewers in the same position that the search engines themselves are in: both are readers of the queries, both are in a position of having to interpret what the query means, what it points to, what it indexes, what it wants. Perhaps the search engine’s reading is a more constrained, instrumental one; perhaps it wants only to know more precisely what the searcher wants to know, get, learn. Whereas Beacon’s viewers, forced into the position of search engine-as-reader, get to have a more wide-reaching curiosity, get to have pathologizing thoughts, more sociological thoughts, make the searcher into a general person rather than a singular person. But the search engine uses rules to interpret the query, which is its own form of generalization: making an individual into a general person on the basis of their wants and wishes, insofar as those wants and wishes are able to be articulated with the wants and wishes of other searchers, insofar as the wants and wishes are generalizable. Where the general probably means repeated; where something like that wish has been seen before, so that it can 1. Be predicted by the database and the crawlers and 2. Be predicted by the program that matches queries to the database, one representation to another.
When a person’s query encounters the search engine database, one representation (of the web as indexed by, say, google) encounters another (a person’s capacity to render their wish in words). A representation of the web meets a representation of a single person’s wish. The results of the encounter are called “hits.” Why hits? Literally, a hit is where a person’s wish hits, impacts, lands in the database. The search engine then returns these hits as results, but they are literally the trace of an impact.
Friday, May 2, 2008
SEARCHING and SCALES OF BEING
[having just read a little more about the technical side of search engines]
HowThingsWork claims that to search google is to only search half of the searchable web. There are many reasons why a particular search engine may fail to index some sites: they think they're spamming search engines, their spiders don't find it, or they do index it but it never shows up in a user search because they rank the page so low.
So it's interesting that beacon mainly uses dogpile. I think this is because they could get access to it, and it's hard to imagine that this has anything to do with the nature of the queries people type, but it does mean that the results of any particular query (notably outside the frame of beacon) are a smaller-than-50% portion of the web, as dogpile doesn't even rank in the top 5 of search engines in terms of the size of their database. The online version of Beacon does make a point of telling us that it's searching dogpile. I don't think the projected version they installed in NYC mentioned the source.
But inside or outside the frame of the work, just the idea that any given search engine only provides access to a portion of the web (and the WWW itself is only a portion of the Internet, while the internet is generally not searchable in the search engines that most people use, e.g. google, yahoo, ask) is useful. It always feels to me like I'm searching the entire web, that any shortfalls in the results of my queries are more about the fit between my query and the world than about any paucity in the world. But in fact, the vastness of the world opened onto by any given search engine is far smaller than I tend to imagine, although still vast. Does this matter? Do variations in numbers of this size matter? If so, to what? Or whom?
An idea which drives the thought of biopolitics is that power, knowledge and self-knowledge work different at large scales than they do at small. At a biopolitical scale (e.g. the population of single mothers), the knowledge is statistical, kept in databases, indexed...much like the information stored by search engines (accumulated by spiders). It is relevant and not relevant to any given person to whom it applies: they are described by it, they may choose to believe what it tells them about themselves, but the very fact of its statistical being means that there will be some excess, some ill-fit somewhere when experienced at the small scale of individuality. But to the person wanting the large scale view, wanting to experience personhood through the lens of the large scale biopolitical technology, the sense of relevant personhood (single mothers) not only perfectly fits the stats, it exemplifies them. This is the point, because you want to be able to do work with those large numbers, those averages: make distinctions, provide care to some and not to others, etc.
Beacon seems to work at a very small scale: one search at a time, one searcher at a time. The seriality reinforces the sense of individuality given. So does the idiosyncrasy of the searches themselves. Any laugh we might derive, shock, disbelief, etc., any emotional response we have to the voice or intent of a particular search is attributable to exactly one anonymous somebody out there. They are perfectly distinct, perfectly isolated, and this is more true the more idiosyncratic we find the query to be. It's like whatever being+1: plus one quality. Being defined by the single quality or small cluster of qualities named in that search, the one we see until another one fades into view.
But another perspective on seriality says that what gets reinforced by the series movement is not the individuality of any given query in the series (or the singularity of any given painting in Kawara's date paintings, say), but the collection, the population, the X being accumulated slowly over time. Beacon voices this perspective on its work by referring in the supporting documentation to its role as a sample of where "we" are now, or our collective activity. It wants to teach us something about "us." About the sort of collective activity we're about when we do searches. About "our" interests, desires, quirks, loves, confusions, ignorances.... The pace of movement in the series, 1 every 1.5 seconds (online, I think the projected version is a little slower) reinforces this collectivization: the way it accumulates into something like a sociology, reads like a ticker tape of ethnographic data.
But a resonance of the name, Beacon, calls to a third function of the series movement: a beacon stays steady, repeats, so that other changes can be noticed as events. In the case of a beacon on the shore, the beacon lights up steadily, a steady pulse, so ships can recognize the presence of land as a potential change to their path...and avoid it. Steer clear. In that sense, the pulses of Beacon, the individual queries passing by 1 by 1, are more alike than different. The point is that they pulse, one then another; this is the formal view of what Beacon presents that is like the action of a beacon. The action, change, variability, in this sense, lies in the encounter with Beacon (like a ship encounters the light of a lighthouse as a beacon). The encounter marks the potential change that has already crept up on one (following the lighthouse as an exemplar of beacons). Once you've encountered a beacon, something has already changed in your situation. The change is at hand, maybe an immanent danger, maybe just an immanent shift, change, perturbation. Beacon warns of other encounters, more dramatic ones. Beacons produce an encounter that is not dramatic so people can avoid the more dramatic, impactful ones. Here we seem again to be working at a small scale, because the kind of accumulation specific to the repetitious pulse of a beacon is never something that adds to anything: it simply continues, unchanged, never progressing beyond One. One, then one, then one....
So isn't that something that's important about each individual query, understood now for its idiosyncratic content (wish, desire, confusion...), the way that it is a pulse (never changing in order to mark changes elsewhere) and a near-singularity, a whatever being+1 and a piece of ethnographic data, important for itself but only insofar as it sits within a set. And what is THAT status, vis a vis subjectivity? Are those three states that we move between? Being a pulse in the social (voting, buying groceries, or anything branded...despite what the brands tell us about individuality), being whatever being+1 (that is, defined by a single quality, known and knowable only through that quality), and being biopolitical (a piece of data, important for the particular bit we add to the collection, but only insofar as we add up to something bigger, something that is knowable at another scale). Three scales of being, all of which seem strobically present in any online encounter, all of which are telegraphed by, and constitutive of, the strangeness of the queries we see flash by serially in Beacon. [in which case, what of the forced analogy between query or search string and subjectivity?]
HowThingsWork claims that to search google is to only search half of the searchable web. There are many reasons why a particular search engine may fail to index some sites: they think they're spamming search engines, their spiders don't find it, or they do index it but it never shows up in a user search because they rank the page so low.
So it's interesting that beacon mainly uses dogpile. I think this is because they could get access to it, and it's hard to imagine that this has anything to do with the nature of the queries people type, but it does mean that the results of any particular query (notably outside the frame of beacon) are a smaller-than-50% portion of the web, as dogpile doesn't even rank in the top 5 of search engines in terms of the size of their database. The online version of Beacon does make a point of telling us that it's searching dogpile. I don't think the projected version they installed in NYC mentioned the source.
But inside or outside the frame of the work, just the idea that any given search engine only provides access to a portion of the web (and the WWW itself is only a portion of the Internet, while the internet is generally not searchable in the search engines that most people use, e.g. google, yahoo, ask) is useful. It always feels to me like I'm searching the entire web, that any shortfalls in the results of my queries are more about the fit between my query and the world than about any paucity in the world. But in fact, the vastness of the world opened onto by any given search engine is far smaller than I tend to imagine, although still vast. Does this matter? Do variations in numbers of this size matter? If so, to what? Or whom?
An idea which drives the thought of biopolitics is that power, knowledge and self-knowledge work different at large scales than they do at small. At a biopolitical scale (e.g. the population of single mothers), the knowledge is statistical, kept in databases, indexed...much like the information stored by search engines (accumulated by spiders). It is relevant and not relevant to any given person to whom it applies: they are described by it, they may choose to believe what it tells them about themselves, but the very fact of its statistical being means that there will be some excess, some ill-fit somewhere when experienced at the small scale of individuality. But to the person wanting the large scale view, wanting to experience personhood through the lens of the large scale biopolitical technology, the sense of relevant personhood (single mothers) not only perfectly fits the stats, it exemplifies them. This is the point, because you want to be able to do work with those large numbers, those averages: make distinctions, provide care to some and not to others, etc.
Beacon seems to work at a very small scale: one search at a time, one searcher at a time. The seriality reinforces the sense of individuality given. So does the idiosyncrasy of the searches themselves. Any laugh we might derive, shock, disbelief, etc., any emotional response we have to the voice or intent of a particular search is attributable to exactly one anonymous somebody out there. They are perfectly distinct, perfectly isolated, and this is more true the more idiosyncratic we find the query to be. It's like whatever being+1: plus one quality. Being defined by the single quality or small cluster of qualities named in that search, the one we see until another one fades into view.
But another perspective on seriality says that what gets reinforced by the series movement is not the individuality of any given query in the series (or the singularity of any given painting in Kawara's date paintings, say), but the collection, the population, the X being accumulated slowly over time. Beacon voices this perspective on its work by referring in the supporting documentation to its role as a sample of where "we" are now, or our collective activity. It wants to teach us something about "us." About the sort of collective activity we're about when we do searches. About "our" interests, desires, quirks, loves, confusions, ignorances.... The pace of movement in the series, 1 every 1.5 seconds (online, I think the projected version is a little slower) reinforces this collectivization: the way it accumulates into something like a sociology, reads like a ticker tape of ethnographic data.
But a resonance of the name, Beacon, calls to a third function of the series movement: a beacon stays steady, repeats, so that other changes can be noticed as events. In the case of a beacon on the shore, the beacon lights up steadily, a steady pulse, so ships can recognize the presence of land as a potential change to their path...and avoid it. Steer clear. In that sense, the pulses of Beacon, the individual queries passing by 1 by 1, are more alike than different. The point is that they pulse, one then another; this is the formal view of what Beacon presents that is like the action of a beacon. The action, change, variability, in this sense, lies in the encounter with Beacon (like a ship encounters the light of a lighthouse as a beacon). The encounter marks the potential change that has already crept up on one (following the lighthouse as an exemplar of beacons). Once you've encountered a beacon, something has already changed in your situation. The change is at hand, maybe an immanent danger, maybe just an immanent shift, change, perturbation. Beacon warns of other encounters, more dramatic ones. Beacons produce an encounter that is not dramatic so people can avoid the more dramatic, impactful ones. Here we seem again to be working at a small scale, because the kind of accumulation specific to the repetitious pulse of a beacon is never something that adds to anything: it simply continues, unchanged, never progressing beyond One. One, then one, then one....
So isn't that something that's important about each individual query, understood now for its idiosyncratic content (wish, desire, confusion...), the way that it is a pulse (never changing in order to mark changes elsewhere) and a near-singularity, a whatever being+1 and a piece of ethnographic data, important for itself but only insofar as it sits within a set. And what is THAT status, vis a vis subjectivity? Are those three states that we move between? Being a pulse in the social (voting, buying groceries, or anything branded...despite what the brands tell us about individuality), being whatever being+1 (that is, defined by a single quality, known and knowable only through that quality), and being biopolitical (a piece of data, important for the particular bit we add to the collection, but only insofar as we add up to something bigger, something that is knowable at another scale). Three scales of being, all of which seem strobically present in any online encounter, all of which are telegraphed by, and constitutive of, the strangeness of the queries we see flash by serially in Beacon. [in which case, what of the forced analogy between query or search string and subjectivity?]
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Searching | Thinking
What do people search for?
Love
Jobs
Answers
the Truth
Signs of extraterrestrial life
Recipes
Cars
The other sock
Sex
Good sex
The name of songs
Lyrics of songs
A musician's name
The year that X happened
Inner peace
The holy grail
Lost civilizations
Rare animals (giant squid)
The right address
The perfect X
A good doctor
The cause of their pain
Their "real" parents
Their ancestors (race, ethnicity)
A better mortgage
Maybe searching is the search for relief from a want. What if wishes are burdens. Small burdens. The feeling of not being able to recall a name that you know you once knew: that's a small or large burden. It's a burden on consciousness because it's hard to think about anything else. It makes us obsessive. In those situations, search engines are a relief from that spike of desire: which is a desire to know, which is a desire to stop wanting to know. Search engines staunch a wanting, where there is little or no pleasure in the wanting.
This raises the broader question of the relation between pleasure and searching, pleasure and not knowing, pleasure and wanting to know, pleasure and wishing, pleasure and desire. Then: how much is the desire to know (or the desire to stop wanting to know) akin to desire as it has been theorized psychoanalytically? J. Dean talks about the will to know, but I'm not sure she's talking about the desire to know. The wanting subject in her account is pretty simple: they want information, they search for it. Those are the only activities she cares about, because they're what allow her to conclude that that activity feels like working democracy. But there must be a spectrum of affect related to the desire to know, and a set of activities tailored to the task of knowing, finding out: e.g. sustaining the desire to know, stoking the confusion, exploring the confusion (how much don't I/we know about this topic?), going to a favorite reference, the set of creative second-efforts when the first fails, the people we call on to know stuff we don't know, the people who know the reference sources we don't know (the people are the meta-meta-resources, but we're after the meta-resources).
Heidegger's concern in the world picture essay was that a particular mode of knowing (could we say searching here?) was dominating and so limiting what it is possible to think. Searching had become, in the era of imaging technologies, a limit to thought. So the theory here is that our resources for searching are a condition of possibility (and to Heidegger, the key one) for thought itself, for thinking itself. When our resources for searching get poorer, our capacity to think gets poorer. Is the opposite true? When our resources for searching expand, does our capacity for thought expand?
I doubt anyone evaluating search engines would say so. They make a distinction between information or data and thought itself. We might need information in order to think (copyright believes this, or used to), but our capacity for thought comes from somewhere else. This is like the Reynoldsian aesthetic relationship between mechanical skill and artistic genius. Mechanical skill is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Between the two, something magical has to happen.
So does Heidegger disagree with this? Does he believe that thought is a question of having/being able to get the right information? So that if our search engines (theories, concepts) are poor, we only have access to a limited range of information, and our capacity for thought suffers. Maybe. It will depend on how he defines world pictures: i.e. how closely they're related to the tools the produce them, how much room for creative thought he thinks there is between the tools that make world pictures (search engines) and the pictures themselves, and then, between that relationship and our capacity for thought.
Are concepts search engines of another sort? (e.g. as Deleuze defines them?)
Theories? (as Spivak defines them)
What about disciplinary methods? The tools that a discipline invents to learn the kinds of things about itself and the world that it studies that it knows how to respect: these are search engines. They provide a window, a frame, through which people (who know how to use it) can search for the right kind of information.
What limits a search engine?
What limits a theory, concept, method?
How adaptable is the tool? How adaptable is a search engine? One only has the window to work with, unless you're a designer of search engine software. Arguably, theorists are writers of concepts, although in practice it doesn't always work this way (people apply rather than adapt). But not all users of search engines are writers of the engine itself: one has at one's disposal the semantics of forming a search. And there are rules for this, and I suppose those rules can be bent or broken or adapted, but I wonder about the range of adaptation (this is a technical question). Is it possible to form search strings that work around the programmed features of a search engine? To fiddle with the semantics of search strings in a way that will work (i.e. bring back the info one wants)?
So here a technical question about search engines (their adaptability) runs closely parallel to a question about the adaptability of disciplines (their concepts, their methods). To what extent is a discipline a program, like a software is a program? What are the features of a discipline that take the writing of that discipline (and its tools) out of the hands of the people who work in it (e.g. tenure pressure, conference structure, peer review...as potentially limiting standards; also gender and race and sexuality and any form of marginalization, tokenization).
Thinking about A. Galloway, how does protocol determine search engines? What is their protocological face? And then can his concept of protocol be adapted to think about rubrics of thoughts, analytics, disciplinary tools? I.e. as a form of power that courses through disciplines, determining their outcomes (Heidegger), influencing what it's possible to think and do within them?
+++
A search engine is a mode of thinking, and therefore, an envelope for thinking. One has to produce thought to form a search string (to try to connect one's wish with what the network contains); but one also takes the results as an input for thought, both toward the production of better search strings in the distant or near future, but also toward the pursuit of whatever task is connected or might be connected to the reason one was searching in the first place.
Love
Jobs
Answers
the Truth
Signs of extraterrestrial life
Recipes
Cars
The other sock
Sex
Good sex
The name of songs
Lyrics of songs
A musician's name
The year that X happened
Inner peace
The holy grail
Lost civilizations
Rare animals (giant squid)
The right address
The perfect X
A good doctor
The cause of their pain
Their "real" parents
Their ancestors (race, ethnicity)
A better mortgage
Maybe searching is the search for relief from a want. What if wishes are burdens. Small burdens. The feeling of not being able to recall a name that you know you once knew: that's a small or large burden. It's a burden on consciousness because it's hard to think about anything else. It makes us obsessive. In those situations, search engines are a relief from that spike of desire: which is a desire to know, which is a desire to stop wanting to know. Search engines staunch a wanting, where there is little or no pleasure in the wanting.
This raises the broader question of the relation between pleasure and searching, pleasure and not knowing, pleasure and wanting to know, pleasure and wishing, pleasure and desire. Then: how much is the desire to know (or the desire to stop wanting to know) akin to desire as it has been theorized psychoanalytically? J. Dean talks about the will to know, but I'm not sure she's talking about the desire to know. The wanting subject in her account is pretty simple: they want information, they search for it. Those are the only activities she cares about, because they're what allow her to conclude that that activity feels like working democracy. But there must be a spectrum of affect related to the desire to know, and a set of activities tailored to the task of knowing, finding out: e.g. sustaining the desire to know, stoking the confusion, exploring the confusion (how much don't I/we know about this topic?), going to a favorite reference, the set of creative second-efforts when the first fails, the people we call on to know stuff we don't know, the people who know the reference sources we don't know (the people are the meta-meta-resources, but we're after the meta-resources).
Heidegger's concern in the world picture essay was that a particular mode of knowing (could we say searching here?) was dominating and so limiting what it is possible to think. Searching had become, in the era of imaging technologies, a limit to thought. So the theory here is that our resources for searching are a condition of possibility (and to Heidegger, the key one) for thought itself, for thinking itself. When our resources for searching get poorer, our capacity to think gets poorer. Is the opposite true? When our resources for searching expand, does our capacity for thought expand?
I doubt anyone evaluating search engines would say so. They make a distinction between information or data and thought itself. We might need information in order to think (copyright believes this, or used to), but our capacity for thought comes from somewhere else. This is like the Reynoldsian aesthetic relationship between mechanical skill and artistic genius. Mechanical skill is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Between the two, something magical has to happen.
So does Heidegger disagree with this? Does he believe that thought is a question of having/being able to get the right information? So that if our search engines (theories, concepts) are poor, we only have access to a limited range of information, and our capacity for thought suffers. Maybe. It will depend on how he defines world pictures: i.e. how closely they're related to the tools the produce them, how much room for creative thought he thinks there is between the tools that make world pictures (search engines) and the pictures themselves, and then, between that relationship and our capacity for thought.
Are concepts search engines of another sort? (e.g. as Deleuze defines them?)
Theories? (as Spivak defines them)
What about disciplinary methods? The tools that a discipline invents to learn the kinds of things about itself and the world that it studies that it knows how to respect: these are search engines. They provide a window, a frame, through which people (who know how to use it) can search for the right kind of information.
What limits a search engine?
What limits a theory, concept, method?
How adaptable is the tool? How adaptable is a search engine? One only has the window to work with, unless you're a designer of search engine software. Arguably, theorists are writers of concepts, although in practice it doesn't always work this way (people apply rather than adapt). But not all users of search engines are writers of the engine itself: one has at one's disposal the semantics of forming a search. And there are rules for this, and I suppose those rules can be bent or broken or adapted, but I wonder about the range of adaptation (this is a technical question). Is it possible to form search strings that work around the programmed features of a search engine? To fiddle with the semantics of search strings in a way that will work (i.e. bring back the info one wants)?
So here a technical question about search engines (their adaptability) runs closely parallel to a question about the adaptability of disciplines (their concepts, their methods). To what extent is a discipline a program, like a software is a program? What are the features of a discipline that take the writing of that discipline (and its tools) out of the hands of the people who work in it (e.g. tenure pressure, conference structure, peer review...as potentially limiting standards; also gender and race and sexuality and any form of marginalization, tokenization).
Thinking about A. Galloway, how does protocol determine search engines? What is their protocological face? And then can his concept of protocol be adapted to think about rubrics of thoughts, analytics, disciplinary tools? I.e. as a form of power that courses through disciplines, determining their outcomes (Heidegger), influencing what it's possible to think and do within them?
+++
A search engine is a mode of thinking, and therefore, an envelope for thinking. One has to produce thought to form a search string (to try to connect one's wish with what the network contains); but one also takes the results as an input for thought, both toward the production of better search strings in the distant or near future, but also toward the pursuit of whatever task is connected or might be connected to the reason one was searching in the first place.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Searching, Beacon
I argued before that Beacon operated like a broken public, invoking Foucault's broken calligram: the figure that invokes its parts only to show their non-fit (as an ongoing condition). For a public, that would mean reflecting people back to themselves in what feels like a public way (having the feeling of looking at information that seems to reach toward some universalized representation), but that never achieves publicness in that sense, never becomes universal, never becomes a picture, remains a series of searches that are hard to read. That don't seem to add up. But that still feel, and maybe for that fact feel, evocative, mysterious, strange, odd, repulsive, confusing. My sense of its publicness, then, was an effect of its status as data. It seems to present us with data, culled from the web, streamed in real-time. It's formal markers point to its status as data: real-time, quoted, simply cut and paste or streamed and not manipulated, one after another...like ticker tape.
[aside about ticker tape: how did it work, when did it stop, who invented it and why? 1867, Edward Calahan, for stocks, from a Telegraph company. Edison too. Text output in readable text, not morris code. Obsolete in the 1960s with computer tech and faster real-time]
Also its plainness. It presents as very little but the search strings themselves. Data here would be the stuff that gets made into representations of the public: census, voting stats, pre-poll stats, demographics, marketing. But data has an unofficial status too: that which we all collect, our own nonce-polls, our own observations of how many women are wearing heels this year, of how many men are or are not wearing suits, or the color pink. Berlant calls this the stuff that forms the lineaments of individuality, where individuality is a shell of conventionality lived in as specific (particular details) and generic (genre: a genre of self). I think Beacon presents data in that idiom: the idiom people use, and read (Ranciere) as the basis for trying to know something about the world. Here, how people search, but maybe more centrally, more obviously, what people desire. And less generously: what people do when they're alone, when they think no one is looking, when they are indulging their grossest fantasies, etc. The kind of individuality Berlant describes, a way of living inside conventionality as a life, as one's own life, needs data. It needs to track btw its own behaviors and what it takes to be conventional; it needs to notice the difference in the small details, the small deviations from center, but also notice, however consciously or un-, the bigger shell of conventionality one inhabits as normativity, as a mode of power or invisibility or just getting by. I think Beacon presents data in that general genre of data. It looks like it, functions like it.
But my sense of brokenness before was an intuition that it doesn't finally work that way, it can't get you there, it doesn't add up, even though it adds and adds, serially, endlessly. Still though, something does change over time with the watching. Maybe it's not knowledge that results (although i guess one could count the number of porn searches; one could count all sorts of things; one could make proper data), but it's something more than random. Affective data? Data that only registers as feelngs in a body: fascination, boredom (I wonder), prurient curiosity.... I think if Beacon captures people in any way, it starts with affective data: the registration of data on/in the body as affects. Something seems fascinating or weird or off. This is true even before one understands what one is seeing, when one thinks it's just a strange serial text piece.
Two fascinations that might arise:
-how could someone want that?
-how could someone type that?
So Beacon figures a relation between desire and articulation, the intimate space we may or may not hide from others (or be able to hide from others) and the unfolding of those desires into the world in the form of searches: tactics for getting what we want. How to make the world respond to you, to give you what you want. How to carve out a little place for yourself where your desires get met. The semantics of the search string ARE those tactics. Writing one's self becomes the means for making a world for oneself, for one's desires [this is speaking only of searching in general; not necessarily how it manifests in Beacon]. Is it ever so correlated? So direct? You write to get what you want. A recipe, gay porn, relief (pictures of cute animals in google image). Is this a quality of the impact of reading the strings in Beacon? Their directness, the tight correlation between desire and means for getting it? It is fascinating to watch that correlation write itself in the form of short banal strings of words that skip grammar in favor of directness. Even the grammar of the strings mirrors the correlation: skip the words that don't help, that don't extend a referent toward the object of desire. "The" and "a" won't get you there, specificity and generality, the and a. Skip those. Adjectives help (big, gay, hot), nouns are the bedrock of any search (recipe, roses).
How does desire normally write itself? What idioms? How direct? What indirections and why those indirections? Self help books that encourage people to ask for what they want encourage people to make tighter the correlation between their desire and their language for getting it. Just ask for it. But first you have to know it. That's another feature of Beacon: every search string seems to be authored by someone who knows just what they want. Some are VERY specific. Others are more vague, as though they are looking around for their desire, where desire is an open space, where it could be many things. And if they don't appear to know what they want, isn't this an effect of being unskilled at the idiom? We might imagine that people are frustrated, knowing what they want, but not able to make the world return it to them. It's out there, why can't I find the words to bring it back. (This is a different sense of "it's out there" than J. Dean's, which is a treadmill goad to producing the false sense in people that they are participating in democracy, and that therefore democracy is working. Search engines formalize (make possible) the hope that, if only one can find the right words, just the right string of un-grammatical words, one can make a little moment in the world where the world returns what they wanted, however small. But here the form counts. Maybe getting a small thing contains a very small, static, formal version ofgetting a big thing. It takes the form of satisfaction, worlding oneself, but with less intensity. Although, is intensity everything here?
[aside about ticker tape: how did it work, when did it stop, who invented it and why? 1867, Edward Calahan, for stocks, from a Telegraph company. Edison too. Text output in readable text, not morris code. Obsolete in the 1960s with computer tech and faster real-time]
Also its plainness. It presents as very little but the search strings themselves. Data here would be the stuff that gets made into representations of the public: census, voting stats, pre-poll stats, demographics, marketing. But data has an unofficial status too: that which we all collect, our own nonce-polls, our own observations of how many women are wearing heels this year, of how many men are or are not wearing suits, or the color pink. Berlant calls this the stuff that forms the lineaments of individuality, where individuality is a shell of conventionality lived in as specific (particular details) and generic (genre: a genre of self). I think Beacon presents data in that idiom: the idiom people use, and read (Ranciere) as the basis for trying to know something about the world. Here, how people search, but maybe more centrally, more obviously, what people desire. And less generously: what people do when they're alone, when they think no one is looking, when they are indulging their grossest fantasies, etc. The kind of individuality Berlant describes, a way of living inside conventionality as a life, as one's own life, needs data. It needs to track btw its own behaviors and what it takes to be conventional; it needs to notice the difference in the small details, the small deviations from center, but also notice, however consciously or un-, the bigger shell of conventionality one inhabits as normativity, as a mode of power or invisibility or just getting by. I think Beacon presents data in that general genre of data. It looks like it, functions like it.
But my sense of brokenness before was an intuition that it doesn't finally work that way, it can't get you there, it doesn't add up, even though it adds and adds, serially, endlessly. Still though, something does change over time with the watching. Maybe it's not knowledge that results (although i guess one could count the number of porn searches; one could count all sorts of things; one could make proper data), but it's something more than random. Affective data? Data that only registers as feelngs in a body: fascination, boredom (I wonder), prurient curiosity.... I think if Beacon captures people in any way, it starts with affective data: the registration of data on/in the body as affects. Something seems fascinating or weird or off. This is true even before one understands what one is seeing, when one thinks it's just a strange serial text piece.
Two fascinations that might arise:
-how could someone want that?
-how could someone type that?
So Beacon figures a relation between desire and articulation, the intimate space we may or may not hide from others (or be able to hide from others) and the unfolding of those desires into the world in the form of searches: tactics for getting what we want. How to make the world respond to you, to give you what you want. How to carve out a little place for yourself where your desires get met. The semantics of the search string ARE those tactics. Writing one's self becomes the means for making a world for oneself, for one's desires [this is speaking only of searching in general; not necessarily how it manifests in Beacon]. Is it ever so correlated? So direct? You write to get what you want. A recipe, gay porn, relief (pictures of cute animals in google image). Is this a quality of the impact of reading the strings in Beacon? Their directness, the tight correlation between desire and means for getting it? It is fascinating to watch that correlation write itself in the form of short banal strings of words that skip grammar in favor of directness. Even the grammar of the strings mirrors the correlation: skip the words that don't help, that don't extend a referent toward the object of desire. "The" and "a" won't get you there, specificity and generality, the and a. Skip those. Adjectives help (big, gay, hot), nouns are the bedrock of any search (recipe, roses).
How does desire normally write itself? What idioms? How direct? What indirections and why those indirections? Self help books that encourage people to ask for what they want encourage people to make tighter the correlation between their desire and their language for getting it. Just ask for it. But first you have to know it. That's another feature of Beacon: every search string seems to be authored by someone who knows just what they want. Some are VERY specific. Others are more vague, as though they are looking around for their desire, where desire is an open space, where it could be many things. And if they don't appear to know what they want, isn't this an effect of being unskilled at the idiom? We might imagine that people are frustrated, knowing what they want, but not able to make the world return it to them. It's out there, why can't I find the words to bring it back. (This is a different sense of "it's out there" than J. Dean's, which is a treadmill goad to producing the false sense in people that they are participating in democracy, and that therefore democracy is working. Search engines formalize (make possible) the hope that, if only one can find the right words, just the right string of un-grammatical words, one can make a little moment in the world where the world returns what they wanted, however small. But here the form counts. Maybe getting a small thing contains a very small, static, formal version ofgetting a big thing. It takes the form of satisfaction, worlding oneself, but with less intensity. Although, is intensity everything here?
Monday, April 28, 2008
Searching (after talk with Abby B.L.)
There is something optimistic about google searching. The very fact that it's possible makes one feel that an answer is there. Abby sometimes puts in questions that can have no answer (cf. Thomson and Craighead's tea towels) just to go through the feelings of forming the question, then sitting in proximity to the process whereby (albeit with other questions) there might be an answer. Just going through the form of searching, formulating the search, makes it feel as though one is near some possibility.
The point being that search engines seem or promise to put their users in contact with, however attenuated, however frustrating and tangential, some massive set of resources, knowledges, jokes, gossips, images, photographs, news, politics.... I think this probably wasn't true when search engines were new. I remember the dominant feeling being that there MIGHT be info that I need out there, but that I had no idea how to bring it back. I didn't know the idiom, it felt like another language, someone else's language. To feel frustrated, I didn't need to feel that I could find the answer to any question (I don't think I felt that way); I just needed to know that there might be an answer to the specific thing I wanted.
Now, I think it's different. And it's not just all felt as information. It's a massiveness, a repleteness. More entertainment than anyone could way. More knowledge. More facts. More gossip. More politics, More anger and more love and more porn. It's always n+1 to one's imagination and capacity. It's an endlessness of time and materials.
In part [because I just finished reading the Exploit, Thacker and Galloway] this is a network effect, because networks connect, they spread, they move outward, they gather. Search engines put one into contact with a network, allow one to spread out inside a network that they call into being from the larger network, with a search term. The search string conjures that network. It makes it.
Whatever one feels, it's felt in the face of that massiveness: calm, focused, pragmatic, problem-solving, exhilarated, bored, overwhelmed, confused...all felt at the portal to the web. But there is an empirical question here: how do people feel (1.) about their visualization of the web (2.). Do they visualize it as large? As impossibly big? As overwhelming? As containing the total set of anything they'd need? Or as always excluding that set? Excluding JUST that set? I imagine this would influence how people felt about their own search terms, maybe even influence how they formed their searches (e.g. formed to exclude a LOT of stuff right off the bat, i.e. very specific, or, formed to include as much as possible, i.e. very general because one doesn't think a lot will come back).
I could actually try to learn something about this by watching Beacon: i.e. watch for how general the terms are, and how specific. What they are general about (these would be things that, possibly, people don't feel there will be a lot of information about, wishes they feel alone in holding, desires they feel won't be provided by the world), and what they are specific about (the world is replete in resources for fulfilling that wish, reciprocating that desires, so much so that I want to narrow my search, cast smaller the net of my belonging, I don't want to belong to the wider set of all X. With porn, e.g., one might not want ALL the porn, might not want to feel included among a set of all porn, all fetishes, all desires, might feel that their own desire is more particular, maybe even is killed or negated or dampened by the larger set, so the search string is more constrained, one tries to produce a smaller network for oneself, where that network is a form of belonging, the form of belonging for that minute).
To create one's own network with a search string is to create a form of belonging. One might feel that they already belong to X, and the search merely instantiates it (i.e. in an instant of form-making). Or one might feel that they desire to belong to X, and the search string is a vector in that direction. A movement toward some vague something, a feeling, nearness. The writing of the string itself might be this feeling, might create the desired feeling of with-ness. To sit in a room and articulate the desire to oneself and then sit in front of a computer with the intention of forming that desire into words, but not just any words, words that use an imagination for what's our there, for the resources the world brings to one's desire, for how big or how small, for how populated or underpopulated that desire, and then types some words experimentally (knowing you can do it again, re-vise) to see what comes back. To type the search string is to materialize one's imagination for what resources the world/web has to offer one's desire. If one feels that one belongs to some world, the idiom of the search string is a sounding bell, an attempt to send out a sound that returns evidence of some place, some others, some information, some events that feel like what one was looking for.
Not to romanticize it. Not everyone is looking for porn. Sometimes one just wants to know the name of a film long forgotten. One types into google because it's easier than remembering the URL of the IMDB database. Or one doesn't have IMDB bookmarked but they do google. So it's easier and all that's wanted is a single piece of info, something that's driving you crazy. This comes up in social events all the time: the group can't think of something and someone says "google it" or "wikipedia" it. In those situations, one KNOWS the answer is there, but somewhere else, but all around in the sense that, in a city, one is sitting inside a wireless network. More than one at almost all times. It's harder to talk about belonging in these instances. Although...the form of the process is the same. And maybe the way to talk about that repetition, the fact that it's always the same process to type a search string, no matter what you're looking for, is to talk about some search strings connecting one up with one's own memory, experiences, past. The belonging one seeks, in the attempt to type a string that produces the right network, is a re-belonging to one's own experiences (cf. see if Joan Scott resonates here!), one's own memory and past. "I know I saw that," "I know I used to know that," and it will drive me crazy to know that I know but not recall. A search engine here is a relief; it relieves one of the feeling of estrangement from one's own past. I'd rather say it this way than say that search engines are destroying our memories.
And again, the important point for me is that, to the extent that I want to talk about belonging, it's a VERY undramatic form of belonging, sometimes barely there, sometimes barely a feeling. It doesn't have to fill a massive need, a big want; it can just be a momentary thing, even a feeling with no history, no past, no past of unfulfillment, but it also might. A queer in a small town (who wrote this essay that I'm thinking of???) using the internet to be connected to a community of queers (Miranda XXX, who wrote the book about belonging?), to make that community for oneself, to feel connected to sex and to bodies and to feel less alone in one's marginality. This is a kind of now-classic use of the internet to produce forms of belonging that one desires but has no resources for in daily, proximate, geographical life. Life close to home. So one types a search string with the hope of producing a nonce-network, where that network will be partially mimetic (mimetic, but with good surprises) to one's own desire for X, to one's desire for belonging to X, and then sifts the results of what returns. The results are evidence, at first, I'm guessing, not of the failing of the world to return one's desire, to reciprocate with something, but of one's errant language for finding it...
[here a very good example of what Thacker and Galloway mean when they talk about language being so important in network politics]
...so I wonder how many searches one has to type before feeling that it's not their idiom that's the problem, but the world that's the problem, e.g. that there are no foot fetishists in the world, rather than, there are none that I can find? This is an interesting tipping point: where one tips from a focus on one's own capacities for producing belonging for oneself, or finding it, to a focus on the world's resources for providing. Of course, the world here is microcosmed. Just hte net. But it is a microcosm. So it's a small version of, or playing out of the point where one thinks of oneself as the cause for all shortcomings in the world (disciplinarity) in relation to the point where one can start to think of the world as bearing some respoinsibility for those shortfalls (politics). Tipping from "depressed..." to "...it might be political."
The point being that search engines seem or promise to put their users in contact with, however attenuated, however frustrating and tangential, some massive set of resources, knowledges, jokes, gossips, images, photographs, news, politics.... I think this probably wasn't true when search engines were new. I remember the dominant feeling being that there MIGHT be info that I need out there, but that I had no idea how to bring it back. I didn't know the idiom, it felt like another language, someone else's language. To feel frustrated, I didn't need to feel that I could find the answer to any question (I don't think I felt that way); I just needed to know that there might be an answer to the specific thing I wanted.
Now, I think it's different. And it's not just all felt as information. It's a massiveness, a repleteness. More entertainment than anyone could way. More knowledge. More facts. More gossip. More politics, More anger and more love and more porn. It's always n+1 to one's imagination and capacity. It's an endlessness of time and materials.
In part [because I just finished reading the Exploit, Thacker and Galloway] this is a network effect, because networks connect, they spread, they move outward, they gather. Search engines put one into contact with a network, allow one to spread out inside a network that they call into being from the larger network, with a search term. The search string conjures that network. It makes it.
Whatever one feels, it's felt in the face of that massiveness: calm, focused, pragmatic, problem-solving, exhilarated, bored, overwhelmed, confused...all felt at the portal to the web. But there is an empirical question here: how do people feel (1.) about their visualization of the web (2.). Do they visualize it as large? As impossibly big? As overwhelming? As containing the total set of anything they'd need? Or as always excluding that set? Excluding JUST that set? I imagine this would influence how people felt about their own search terms, maybe even influence how they formed their searches (e.g. formed to exclude a LOT of stuff right off the bat, i.e. very specific, or, formed to include as much as possible, i.e. very general because one doesn't think a lot will come back).
I could actually try to learn something about this by watching Beacon: i.e. watch for how general the terms are, and how specific. What they are general about (these would be things that, possibly, people don't feel there will be a lot of information about, wishes they feel alone in holding, desires they feel won't be provided by the world), and what they are specific about (the world is replete in resources for fulfilling that wish, reciprocating that desires, so much so that I want to narrow my search, cast smaller the net of my belonging, I don't want to belong to the wider set of all X. With porn, e.g., one might not want ALL the porn, might not want to feel included among a set of all porn, all fetishes, all desires, might feel that their own desire is more particular, maybe even is killed or negated or dampened by the larger set, so the search string is more constrained, one tries to produce a smaller network for oneself, where that network is a form of belonging, the form of belonging for that minute).
To create one's own network with a search string is to create a form of belonging. One might feel that they already belong to X, and the search merely instantiates it (i.e. in an instant of form-making). Or one might feel that they desire to belong to X, and the search string is a vector in that direction. A movement toward some vague something, a feeling, nearness. The writing of the string itself might be this feeling, might create the desired feeling of with-ness. To sit in a room and articulate the desire to oneself and then sit in front of a computer with the intention of forming that desire into words, but not just any words, words that use an imagination for what's our there, for the resources the world brings to one's desire, for how big or how small, for how populated or underpopulated that desire, and then types some words experimentally (knowing you can do it again, re-vise) to see what comes back. To type the search string is to materialize one's imagination for what resources the world/web has to offer one's desire. If one feels that one belongs to some world, the idiom of the search string is a sounding bell, an attempt to send out a sound that returns evidence of some place, some others, some information, some events that feel like what one was looking for.
Not to romanticize it. Not everyone is looking for porn. Sometimes one just wants to know the name of a film long forgotten. One types into google because it's easier than remembering the URL of the IMDB database. Or one doesn't have IMDB bookmarked but they do google. So it's easier and all that's wanted is a single piece of info, something that's driving you crazy. This comes up in social events all the time: the group can't think of something and someone says "google it" or "wikipedia" it. In those situations, one KNOWS the answer is there, but somewhere else, but all around in the sense that, in a city, one is sitting inside a wireless network. More than one at almost all times. It's harder to talk about belonging in these instances. Although...the form of the process is the same. And maybe the way to talk about that repetition, the fact that it's always the same process to type a search string, no matter what you're looking for, is to talk about some search strings connecting one up with one's own memory, experiences, past. The belonging one seeks, in the attempt to type a string that produces the right network, is a re-belonging to one's own experiences (cf. see if Joan Scott resonates here!), one's own memory and past. "I know I saw that," "I know I used to know that," and it will drive me crazy to know that I know but not recall. A search engine here is a relief; it relieves one of the feeling of estrangement from one's own past. I'd rather say it this way than say that search engines are destroying our memories.
And again, the important point for me is that, to the extent that I want to talk about belonging, it's a VERY undramatic form of belonging, sometimes barely there, sometimes barely a feeling. It doesn't have to fill a massive need, a big want; it can just be a momentary thing, even a feeling with no history, no past, no past of unfulfillment, but it also might. A queer in a small town (who wrote this essay that I'm thinking of???) using the internet to be connected to a community of queers (Miranda XXX, who wrote the book about belonging?), to make that community for oneself, to feel connected to sex and to bodies and to feel less alone in one's marginality. This is a kind of now-classic use of the internet to produce forms of belonging that one desires but has no resources for in daily, proximate, geographical life. Life close to home. So one types a search string with the hope of producing a nonce-network, where that network will be partially mimetic (mimetic, but with good surprises) to one's own desire for X, to one's desire for belonging to X, and then sifts the results of what returns. The results are evidence, at first, I'm guessing, not of the failing of the world to return one's desire, to reciprocate with something, but of one's errant language for finding it...
[here a very good example of what Thacker and Galloway mean when they talk about language being so important in network politics]
...so I wonder how many searches one has to type before feeling that it's not their idiom that's the problem, but the world that's the problem, e.g. that there are no foot fetishists in the world, rather than, there are none that I can find? This is an interesting tipping point: where one tips from a focus on one's own capacities for producing belonging for oneself, or finding it, to a focus on the world's resources for providing. Of course, the world here is microcosmed. Just hte net. But it is a microcosm. So it's a small version of, or playing out of the point where one thinks of oneself as the cause for all shortcomings in the world (disciplinarity) in relation to the point where one can start to think of the world as bearing some respoinsibility for those shortfalls (politics). Tipping from "depressed..." to "...it might be political."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)